Today, documents outlining “best practices” and other documents referred to as “white papers” may be found on seemingly every topic from software development to corporate governance. Procedure documents and other standards documents have been created to ensure that the best practices are able to be followed. Even routine tasks that a person performs daily on their job may have an associated procedure that lists the steps needed to be taken in order to perform the tasks. In some industries, such as telecommunications, technicians may be responsible for maintaining a product or device, and may use the procedure documents as a checklist while performing the task. Use of these procedure documents may be required by various industries in order to maintain important certifications or to be in compliance with codes or laws.
There are various standards organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that consist of committees and subcommittees that are responsible for developing standards in many different fields. In order to be certified as compliant with a particular standard, often it is necessary to prove, during an audit or otherwise, that all of an organization's members are using procedure documents, as required. Another common requirement may be that the latest version of a procedure document must always be used. To ensure that any changes to the procedure are available to all technicians or associates, the organization may implement a document control system to be accessed each time a procedure is to be used. Document control systems are commonly known in the art and provide version control and other benefits to documents of all types. Each time the technician or associate would like to access the document, the document control system must be accessed and the correct document located by a search or a similar method.
Various operating systems are commonly used today, with operating systems (OS) from MICROSOFT™, such as the WINDOWS XP™ operating system, being one of the most prevalent. A user of the WINDOWS™ OS is able to select a background for the desktop environment, commonly referred to as wallpaper. Generally, an image file with a JPG, GIF, or BMP file type is selected, but several other file types may also be selected, such as HTML. When the desktop is displayed, the selected background image file is presented along with icons for opening documents or applications and other items typically found on the desktop.
Currently, in order to locate a procedure document within some document management systems, a web browser or other application related to the document management system may be launched for the procedure document to be located. A search for the procedure document may also be necessary once the document management system is opened to locate the procedure document, as well. Not having the correct procedure document or the knowledge of which procedure documents are necessary can be inefficient and cause errors, mimizing the effectiveness of the best practices as embodied in the procedure document.